After years of living in exile, Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and published a series of eight powerfully paired stories, using his experimental "binary" method to both connect them and juxtapose them with each other, illuminating the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian experience. In "The Upcoming Generation," for example, a professor promotes a dull but proletarian student purely out of good will; years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In "Nastenka," two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives—until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both.